“If we’ve evolved from monkeys, then why haven’t those ones evolved?” Warne asked his fellow contestant, the dancer Bonnie Lythgoe, as they lounged on a riverbank in South Africa’s Kruger national park.

“Because, I’m saying, aliens. We started from aliens.”

“Look at those pyramids, Bonnie,” Warne continued. “You couldn’t do them. You couldn’t pull those ropes, huge bits of brick and make it perfectly symmetrical. Couldn’t do it. So who did it?”

Lythgoe reached for the only possible conclusion: “Has to be from another world, has to be.”

“Whatever planet they’re on out there, they decided that they were gonna start some more life here on earth and study us,” Warne went on.

He had found Lythgoe’s line. “Scientifically, we have so many similarities to monkeys, so I don’t know,” she said.

“Maybe they turned a few monkeys into humans and said, ‘Yeah, it works’,” Warne replied.

Darwin’s well-settled theory of evolution does not propose humans evolved from monkeys, but rather that monkeys and humans share an extinct common ancestor.

The spin legend’s spell in the South African wilderness started days after Warne announced his namesake foundation would be closed amid a Victorian state government investigation into the way it was spending money and reporting to authorities.

It emerged last week a raffle held by the foundation to give away a $60,000 car was won by Warne’s former longtime personal assistant, Helen Nolan, herself a former general manager of the foundation.